Various Artists

We'll Never Stop Living This Way: a Ghostly Primer

Ghostly International celebrates 10 years of techno, electro-pop, and instrumental hip-hop with a 30-track digital release and a PDF book.

At first approach, We'll Never Stop Living This Way is a curious compilation. The retrospective celebrating 10 years of Ghostly International's existence runs 30 tracks long, totaling in a little over two and a half hours of music. It's only available digitally, along with it's PDF-formatted The Ghostly Book companion. So, it's a large volume of data, with not much in the way of tangible merchandise-- which, for Ghostly, is fitting. Whether this was label founder Sam Valenti's intention or not, much of the label's output fits right into modern indie's home-recorded electronic pop fascinations from the past few years, its most recent signees-- Gold Panda, Com Truise, Shigeto-- having been plucked from that very movement.

Consider We'll Never Stop Living This Way, then, a well-curated RSS feed, covering everything from techno (Osborne, Lawrence) to instrumental hip-hop (Dabrye, Shigeto) to LCD Soundsystem-indebted dance rock (Matthew Dear) to emotional post-rock (JDSY, Midwest Product), with plenty more gaps filled in along the way. It's stated in The Ghostly Book that electronic artists aren't frequently acknowledged as "album artists". In saying so, a truth about Ghostly is unintentionally revealed: They have only about a handful of "important" full-lengths in their catalog, most of which have seen release in the last few years.

The isolated-track format, however, suits their repertoire well, showcasing especially their taste in dance-oriented sounds that radiate auras of gray warmth while remaining percolating enough for club consumption. These sounds take up the majority of the comp and do a decent job of masking its difficult-to-digest running time; the run from Tycho's "Coastal Brake" to Lawrence's "Five Leaves" feels especially like a well-mixed DJ set. That said, Ghostly's taste in straight-rock sounds has never been as refined; cuts from the late perennial electro-rock also-rans the Mobius Band and sad-sack Danish outfit Choir of Young Believers bring the comp's momentum to enough of a screeching, uncomfortable halt that the only justification for their inclusion is mere completism.

The Ghostly Book fares slightly less well; for one thing, unless you have a tablet-esque device that makes it an easy read, it's still no fun to read a book in PDF format when the physical alternative remains so tactilely alluring. Furthermore, the information contained within doesn't hold much revelatory weight for non-die-hards; indeed, the most curious thing about it is that its chronological coverage seems to cease around in late 2009-- or, right before the label released two of its most successful full-lengths to date, Gold Panda's fantastic debut album, Lucky Shiner, and Matthew Dear's darkly alluring Black City. The comp itself doesn't seem to reflect these recent riches either, choosing GP's techy "You" B-side "Peaky Caps" and the opening track from Dear's 2007 LP, Asa Breed, the sensually smothering "Fleece on Brain".

Minor outrage could be leveled, too, that Osborne's "Outta Sight", from the producer's criminally overlooked self-titled 2008 release, gets an acid-washed Luke Vibert remix that, while neat on its own merits, makes one familiar with the source material long for the untouched original. That the obvious choices from Ghostly's catalog are ignored in favor of deep cuts, however, only reinforces the label's stance as deep-listening curators, rather than heat-seeking hitmakers. When this collection is approached as such, We'll Never Stop Living This Way becomes less of a title and more of a maxim-- one that, hopefully, they continue to do business by.